Monthly Archives: December 2013

A recent Park Avenue advertisement shows a man claiming ownership of a woman by spraying her with deodorant. It’s a visual reference to animals squirting urine to mark their territories in the wild. The global cosmetic brand even celebrates it with a tagline that says “a man marks his territory”. It is a frightening reminder that sexism is intricately woven into our nation’s fabric. Not just for gender stereotyping and power-mongering, but for profiteering too. Television news channels vilify acts of sexual oppression, but they broadcast sexist content and make money of it. Newspapers nurture feminist discourse but print insensitive ads.

Alexandre feels about her husband the way some of the women we’ve known in our lives have felt about theirs. She vents out her frustration at being treated like a sexual instrument. She has put up with it for far too long.

Enlightenment is a heck of thing to pretend to be in pursuit of. With the virtual world chock-full of digitized Buddha trees, cheap messiahs with little else but good grammar and borrowed intellectual acumen spew absurdities in the name of heightened truths. They truly believe the nonsense that they have had to pick up along muddied floors while embarking on the placid journey of their lives. Life has judo flipped them to the ground so many times that they are only a few scars away from being victims of a Steve Seagull action sequence. Now they sit with a smirk on their faces, scratching their wrists and reopening wounds, pretending that they have enough mileage in their limbs and lungs to reach the path of enlightenment.

Pistolero, the Gent and Comanche are the sort of people that our moms warned us about last week. Unwashed and armed Harley Davidson bikers cruising on deserted highways craving for sex, beer and money. The Catholic Church would sign petitions for their souls to skid directly to hell. The neighbourhood citizen watch program would put up posters of them at local pizzerias and shoot darts at them.